Twins (werefkin)
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| Twins |
|---|
| Marianne von Werefkin , 1909 |
| Tempera on cardboard |
| 27.5 × 36.5 cm |
| Fondazione Marianne Werefkin, Museo comunale d'arte, Ascona |
Twins is the title of a painting that the Russian artist Marianne von Werefkin painted in 1909. The work belongs to the holdings of the Fondazione Marianne Werefkin (FMW) in Ascona . There it has the inventory number FMW-0-0-13. The corresponding sketch , a colorful gouache , is in the FMW sketchbook dated 1909.
Technology, dimensions and labeling
It is a tempera painting on cardboard , 27.5 × 36.5 cm. On the back there is a label with the inscription: “Moderne Galerie Thannhauser , Munich Theatinerstr. 7 "
Iconography and Iconology
As powerful pictorial elements, two women in mourning clothes determine the scenery of the painting. They take up more than half of the screen. On their laps they each hold an infant in a christening robe . The symbolic meaning of the colors black and white contain a message of the painting. The two “non-colors” meet each other hard and meaningful. The other colors, on the other hand, do not seem to have an important function for interpreting the picture.
An interpretation by Kandinsky in his book “On the Spiritual in Art”, which he wrote in 1911, can illuminate the meaning of Werefkin's “Twins” , where he aptly explains: “It was not for nothing that white was chosen as a garment of pure joy and of immaculate purity. And black as a garment of the greatest, deepest mourning and as a symbol of death. "
Werefkin's painting “Twins” is undoubtedly a formal reaction to Edvard Munch's painting “Das Erbe” , which he painted in the years 1897–1899. Together with a doctor, he had visited the Saint-Louis hospital in Paris, where he had met a tearful mother with her child, who was stricken with a serious illness. He was so shocked by the encounter that he depicted the woman with the naked child on her lap in oil on a canvas.
From a letter that Munch wrote to his patron Max Linde , one learns the sad truth that the newborn suffered from " syphilis " . In the picture, Munch relentlessly confronts the viewer with the slender child's body disfigured by pustules . Werefkin, who repeatedly orientated herself on Munch's work, must have been extremely affected by the painting “The Heritage” that she used it as an inspiration for her own design. It is one of several of her enigmatic images that are difficult to decipher.
literature
- Clemens Weiler : Marianne Werefkin 1860–1938. Exhib. Cat .: Municipal Museum Wiesbaden 1958
- Bernd Fäthke: Marianne Werefkin, life and work. Munich 1988, p. 93 f, fig. 130–132
- Bernd Fäthke: Marianne Werefkin. Munich 2001, p. 125 ff, fig. 129, ISBN 3-7774-9040-7
- Bernd Fäthke : Marianne Werefkin: Clemens Weiler's Legacy. In: Marianne Werefkin and the Women Artists in her Circle. (Tanja Malycheva and Isabel Wünsche eds.), Leiden / Boston 2016 (English), pp. 8–19, ISBN 978-9-0043-2897-6 , pp. 8–19, here pp. 14–19; JSTOR 10.1163 / j.ctt1w8h0q1.7
Individual evidence
- ↑ Inv. No. a22
- ↑ Wassily Kandinsky: About the spiritual in art, especially in painting: Munich 1912, (1st edition), (The first edition was published by Piper in Munich at the end of 1911 with imprint 1912), p. 80, note 1
- ↑ Wassily Kandinsky: About the spiritual in art, especially in painting: Munich 1912, (1st edition), (The first edition was published by Piper in Munich at the end of 1911 with imprint 1912), p. 81
- ↑ Johan H. Langaard and Reidar Revold: Edvard Munch. Stuttgart 1963, p. 21.
- ^ Arne Eggum: Edvard Munch's new colors and fauvism. In: Munch in France. Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1992, p. 297